


Julian Bashir's Precious Little Life

by bmouse



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Deep Dish Nine, F/M, Garak's Dubious Dating History, M/M, Scott Pilgrim AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 08:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2644445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yes, by all means, let's date the shady couturier/delivery-guy with seven evil exes! Great idea, Julian. Top marks all around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sign Here for Trouble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tinsnip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinsnip/gifts).



> I firmly blame tinsnip and this one tumblr post. This is my first toe-dip into the Deep Dish Nine sandbox. In my version everything is more or less fluffy and mundane but they're all still aliens. + whacky Scott Pilgrim rpg magic stuff applies.

Julian hasn't really seriously dated anyone since Palis made it big. He doesn't think about that too hard, probably because he wouldn't like what it says about him as a person. Ezri's a great roommate but God, she's just as nosy as she is adorable and as much as she's been dropping anvil-hints about him 'boldly getting out there' she is vehemently judging him right now. 

"Oh my god Julian! A schoolgirl? A CATHOLIC SCHOOLGIRL?!" 

He shrugs and puts his hands into his pockets. 

"Not Catholic! It's a magnet school with a vague gnostic affiliation and one stained glass window. Sarina's nice. And she's mature for her age - she's in all AP classes." 

Ezri's fingers are twitching towards the frying pan in that Looney Tunes way. Trouble is he knows she'll use it. She beat Worf off her older sister's stairs during his ‘Say Anything’ routine and then brained him with his own vintage boombox. 

"Relax! Relax - I'm her cover. She's only doing it to make Jack get jealous and notice her and because Patrick thought it was a good idea. And now she's won the bet because Lauren dared her to ask me out and now Lauren has to do her nails for a month."

He hangs his head sheepishly and mumbles "Please don't ask me how I know this much about the rich dramatic lives of teenagers." 

Ezri puts the pan down. 

The awful thing was that Julian still had fun. Walking past the record store with Sarina, holding her hand in a kind of 'we're both joking but the warmth is nice' way, he'd felt like a teenager again himself. Just with his old backpack threadbare from med school and a different pair of skinny jeans that he still bought from Avalon Thrift. Nobody even did a double take. Maybe at first glance his baby-face still held up.

Their 'calculated outing' had been him graciously buying Sarina a giant macchiato with the last of a birthday gift card, lingering in the window seat long enough to be seen by 'the target' and then the two of them sitting side by side in Barnes'n'Noble until it closed, each head-first into a Cold War spy novel after the conversation had fizzled out. 

His protagonist was betrayed in the end. Hers had a happy love affair with another agent but died dramatically. Still the best 'first date' he's had in ages. 

"Oh, OK." His diminutive judge jury and executioner nods thoughtfully. "I'll allow it. Now I don't feel so bad spending money on rush shipping."

Julian can feel the whoosh of a speedily arriving headache.

" _What_ did you do?' 

"No-othing~"

"Please don't tell me you pulled a Jadzia. Did you get me a desperate Ferengi mail order bride?" 

"No, jeez! I got you a shirt. Your jeans are fine but your button downs smell like lecture sweat and your polos smell like pizza and the only other one you have belongs in an 80's aerobics VHS. That's in the trash. Orange and purple?! Together, Julian??"

So what. He likes that shirt. Leeta never complained about it.

"Don't worry I got it from somewhere classy." 

"I'm too tired for this, I'm going to study."

There, that'll show her. Five minutes later the article is boring and he has to ask.

"How do you even know my measurements?" 

She smirks. Oh, right. OK so he likes ripping off the button downs and throwing them into a corner when he gets home. Sometimes his scrub top too - it's cheap, it chafes. Good thing they're strictly platonic, he's 1000% ruined any chances of ever impressing her. 

 

\- - -

 

The doorbell wakes him up. 

"Sign here please." 

Says a voice that sounds like it should be reading W.B. Yeats on audiobook and he almost drops the pen because the hand that hands it to him feels like prettily textured ice.

That's when he gets conscious enough to start noticing things.

It's snowing outside. Drifts have piled up by their little door and outside is all blue-drowned-in-black with little yellow dandelions of light from the streetlamps. But the best color is in the stranger's eyes. They're the palest blue, the way ice gets to keep just enough color to remind you it was once water. 

OK, OK, reality check. There's a Cardassian on his doorstep with a package and a clipboard. By reflex Julian is still holding his cold gray hand. 

"Oh! Damn! Wow it's cold!" he exclaims, pointlessly. His pyjama pants are completely inadequate, his nipples could cut glass under his thin comfortable lucky studying T-shirt while the other man is wearing leather riding boots and a heavy black and gold peacoat. 

"Err, right… signature. Sorry." 

Julian takes the clipboard and signs his John Hancock as the delivery man gives him the most unsubtle but somehow professional once-over he's ever had. 

"Thank you for patronizing Garak's Clothiers." the man says formally "Enjoy your shirt, as you may need it." And with a bland, sarcastic smile - since Julian can't seem to do anything, he closes the door between them. 

Julian puts the package down. _Paging Dr. Bashir, I think I need an icepack._ Because _oh_ , it's like all his latent bisexuality just punched him in the face

_200 cc's of courage, stat._

His eyes track over to a soft white knitted scarf on the wall - his favorite, his one classy scarf. Cardassians don't do well at low temperatures. The eerie/hot delivery man's neckridges had been turning white in the cold. Pulling the scarf around his neck Julian throws on a puffy old raquetball team jacket and and jeans and runs out the door. The footprints are indistinct in the snow and he's managed to get farther than Julian thought, but he catches up to him in the park by the playground.

"Please take this." he gasps, more dramatically out of breath than he’d like, and brandishes the scarf.

The mystery man favors him with a head-tilt. Distinct snowflakes have settled into his glossy black hair. 

"Mister Bashir, I believe garment deliveries are traditionally one-way." 

"Please call me Julian. I'm in school to-, that is to say I’m almost a doctor. So it's hard for me to see untreated symptoms." 

Hesitantly a hand emerges from the sleeve of the ( _embroidered! wow it must be designer_ )peacoat and takes the scarf. 

"Thank you, I didn’t think it would snow." 

He does some kind of graceful loop thing with it that Julian could watch forever and when it settles across his neck and shoulders it looks like it belongs. 

"So you work for 'Garak's’ right?" 

"You see, and please don’t spread this around, but I _am_ Garak. Deliveries are a new thing for the shop and I’ve been short-staffed." 

"So, Mister Garak "- Ugh Julian, you should have just said ‘Garak.’ Now he's like your high school teacher." -read any good books lately?" 

The line is transparent but the question gets him somewhere. Meanwhile he’s glad to see that the scarf is helping lots, Garak’s face no longer looks artistically pinched. His eyes cut to Julian's face and he shivers in the best way. Although also from the windchill.

"Well I do hate to leave things uneven. I've been re-reading this one: The Crimson Shadow."

While he's busy gaping Garak slips inside his personal bubble like it doesn't exist and puts an expensive-looking black USB into his right front pocket.

“But maybe you won't like it." 

Julian’s on practiced ground here. "I suppose I’ll never know until I try!" 

"Just so. You can tell me when you come to collect your scarf.” _Oh the things inflection could do to that sentence._

"How do I find you?" 

"Oh I’m sure you could figure it out, Doctor Bashir." 

Julian stands there, thumbing the USB stick to make sure it's real until Garak walks out of the park and disappears behind a hedge wall. Once unseen, and because his converse have become wet frozen toe-torture devices, he rabbits home in an undignified fashion. 

_Oh my God!_ he thinks, defrosting his toes on Ezri's fancy Trill space heater  
 _What the hell was that! That was like Le Carre! That was like the start of a novel._

_I think I'm in love_

An honest-to-God "meet-cute." At his age. Maybe his last one ever. 

 

That's the easy part.


	2. Gentle Stalking Abounds

Once his toes warm up the non-daydream-y practical part of his brain kicks in.

“Ezri! Do we have a business directory?”

Ezri sticks her head out of her bedroom door, purple sleep mask peched on her dryer-fluffed pixie cut. 

“We _did_ , I let Ziyal have it for a papercraft project.”

“Shit! I guess Quark’s has to have one. It’s still open, right?” The converse are toast but he still has his old scene Docs, though now they pinch a little.

“Or you could look at my order confirmation email. On my phone.” she slides it over, the screen glossy, huge and pristine. Julian has a first-gen “smart” phone that’s bravely chugging along 300 yards behind the competition with a stiff upper lip. It has one of those tiny pop-out keyboards that none of his friends could text on.

He traces the surface reverently. Garak’s Clothiers even has a custom email template for their order confirmations, that’s so... professional. Does he know HTML too? He looks frantically for the address in the footer, almost freaking out when he doesn’t find it but oh, hang on, there it is under the gold and green art deco border in the upper right.

The shop’s at The Promenade? Wow, if he’d actually gone to Quark’s he would have probably run right past it it. Garak in a mini-mall though, that seemed odd somehow. Mind you The Promenade had been built by a Cardassian architect who had cut a swath through that corner of the town - gleefuly pointy-ing up the skyline with sci-fi-looking arches and slanted pyramids before she fucked off back to Prime. Probably on account of the weather. 

All right, there was step one. Looking at the innocuous address by the cold skewering light of the moment he can tell that the churning in his stomach is only 10% habitual hunger, the rest is half-anticipation half-unease. No, he hadn't imagined last night but does he have time to wrangle a date(with attendant sexuality... shift? crisis?) on top of school and work? 

"What do you think ?" he asks Kukkalaka seriously. 

He remembers his last real 'date' before the innocent thing with Sarina (who had texted him ‘MISSION SUCCESS!' and some newfangled glossy smiley emoji as he was making coffee). No that ‘date’ hadn't gone well. 

"You still have your _teddy bear_?" 

That’s what she’d said. No funny punchline to that one.

He’d thought: college girls, OK, let’s try something light to ease myself into it. But her voice had had a distinctly middle school sneer that Jules remembered viscerally and flinched at, even buried as he was several layers under Julian’s skin. After he'd more-or-less politely pointed her in the direction of the bus stop and less politely shut the door in her face he had a headache and a cocktail of anger and self-loathing. Neat, with a shot of panic. Shaken not stirred. Post-Palis Julian didn’t seem to be in demand. Or passing for normal as well as he’d thought.

Why not? Why the hell not date outside his species? Who’s going to say anything? Jadzia's ex with the transparent skull? He’s in a modern city for chrissakes and his parents don’t even know where he lives now.

It’s attractive, and not just in the most obvious way. He won’t have to hide as much. For all Garak probably knows every Human keeps a traditional comfort-object from childhood on the shelf overlooking the bed, cozying up to the collected VHS adventures of Mr. Bond. 

In the middle of all this his ‘Get Out The Door’ alarm beeps. He has 45 minutes before his shift starts so next move requires precision - a surgical strike. The traitor converse are still wet so he puts on the boots, some black jeans and painstakingly covers up his glaring red work polo with a halfway decent gray sweater. At Nebula Coffee he kills the last of another coffee card(it’s not a problem, honest) on a delavian chocolate shot mocha and, defiantly ignoring the single raised eyebrow of the gorgeous blonde at the counter, writes his phone number and 'Prescription for Mr. Garak' under the sleeve. One of the only things his xenobiology textbook was definitive about was that Cardassians liked sweets.

Shielding the cup from the wind with his coat (and praying that as a result it would not acquire eau-du-armpit) moving with the flow of the crowd he makes it to the door of Garak's Clothiers at 7:23 AM. At which point he is struck with a nervousness so intense that only knowing he has 27 minutes left to get to the pizzeria, and therefore only 3 more minutes to wrangle his nerves, plant the coffee and run makes him square his shoulders and peek inside. 

Luck is with him, the place is busy. A Ferengi girl is running her hands through bright shawls on a rack. Two terrifying-looking Klingon women are circling the lingerie table and a blue Bolian man is trying a burnt orange peacoat on in front of a mirror, with Garak himself hovering solicitously at his elbow. 

Just seeing the solid mass of him, the texture of his neck and hands in daylight does something funny to Julian’s knees. Garak turns and Julian gets a little lost in his profile, waits until the last possible second to duck back behind the door. He’s barely breathing, absolutely sure that Garak is looking right at the spot where he’d been. A pleasant sense of ‘danger’ zings up his spine. 

When the Bolian starts fussing about the waistline he darts inside, places the coffee behind the sales counter next to the elegant black keyboard of the shop computer and, mentally cursing the loud squeaks of the snow-wet Docs across the linoleum, barrels out the door.

He barely makes it to work on time and completely forgets to adjust face from ‘happy grinning ninny’ to ‘professional kitchen associate’ and even though she’s mostly indifferent to him on a good day Kira notices.

"Look who's happy. Did you forget it was Saturday?" she asks.

He mumbles something and smoothly slips back into the kitchen where Worf is already beating the dough, massive headphones on and some guttural aria burbling under his breath. Not for the first time Julian is grateful that _he_ absolutely does not care one way or the other. 

He honestly tries not to check his phone every twelve minutes.

After he almost drops it into the cheese he’s supposed to be grating he resolves to at least try and be cool about this. Flipping it open and closed over and over kills the battery anyway and he’s forced to crawl under the break room table and leave it plugged it in for the second half of his shirt. In the end he has a cheerful green 100% battery bar for the first time in weeks and absolutely 0 messages.

Then it’s time for class and the little agonizing thought-blips of ‘He didn’t notice!’ ‘And then the really expensive coffee got cold!’ and ‘I probably misinterpreted the whole thing’ as well as the classic ‘Oh god what if he thinks I’m dating Ezri _and_ trying to pull something on the side’ reluctantly yield to paying attention to a new way to treat Romulan Influenza. 

He’s mostly asleep when he throws his coat to land perfectly onto the coathanger and jacknifes into bed

The next morning he opens the door to find that though snow had fallen his walk has been shoveled in exacting lines, as if someone had waved a wand and teleported the snow away. A thermos is sitting on the welcome mat with a note attached to it via a blue ribbon. 

"Doctor Bashir,  
Thank you for the drink, though I am beginning to fear for the dental health of your patients. You should really look to your own nutrition." 

Handling the thermos ( blue, hexagonal, small Union crest in the corner, definitely not Human manufacture) like a live wire he takes it to the kitchen. For a minute he just leaves it there and microwaves water for his morning Earl Gray, enjoying that mix of warmth and acid in his empty stomach. 

The thermos is filled to the brim with Plomeek soup.

His favorite. 

Reverently he tries to take small delicate sips to make it last but it’s a lost cause from the start. Probably using a spoon would have helped, but it felt like a crime to set it down long enough to rummage in the drawers for one. The flavor’s rich but the broth is even not lumpy the way the more affordable restaurants made it. That, the freshness... it had to be homemade! The whole gesture, the reciprocity of it was simultaneously the most sophisticated and kind date-related thing he’d ever gotten and Julian knows then that he can’t be a coward and let this go.

He’s in a haze of warmth, soup, and tentative fantasy (Dating a mature older man with interesting topography! Who cooks!) and so it takes him a while to notice that Ezri has stuck her head out of her door again. And seems to be talking. 

“So are you coming to the party?”

“Err, what party?” 

\- - -

Julian goes to a party. 

‘What party? Whose party?’ These are mostly rhetorical questions in his circle. Except for Mr. Sisko’s stilted-yet-adorable efforts to have his staff over for holiday dinners the only person who really had enough chutzpah, space, and energy to throw large-scale parties was Jadzia Dax.

After Palis Julian had this crazy idea about dating Jadzia Dax. 

Maybe because in the midst of his...spot of bother(breakdown) he had this vision, this idealized character arc about a man who falls off a cliff and then redeems himself by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. It took her about five minutes to shut him down and make him feel like an idiot schoolboy stammering out one liners while trying to hide a stiffy behind a textbook. It took him a couple months to understand that women weren’t mountains, and his metaphor was terrible and now they were friends.

When he gets there she’s up on the second floor in the middle of a group of girls, holding a flute of something blue and bubbly and laughing, looking genuine and well-at-ease in a way that fills him with admiration (lightly drizzled with envy).

Catching a glance of him dashing up the stairs two at a time the girls around her scatter. _Oh god, not that ‘Cassanova Bashir’ crap again, hasn’t that rumor died yet?_ Anyway he’s got more important things on his mind.

“So... Garak, the guy with the tailor shop? You know him? What do you know about him?” 

Jadzia looks him up and down and gets a squinched little look of glee on her face, to the point where it looks like her eyebrows are about to high-five. Julian mentally kicks himself. That definitely sounded too eager.

But then she waits a beat too long before answering and her face straightens out, smoothing a little ways into some other personality.

“I know _of_ him. That purple stunner for the Halloween party, I commissioned that at his shop And I’ve talked to him maybe seven times, which is quite enough usually, especially if I let Audrid help. But I still can’t say I _know_ him.”

She smiles like she doesn’t mind, like she’s enjoying the mystery as much as Julian, though without that particular personal flutter in her stomach.

“I think we just got complacent you know, our local standards for Cardassians have slipped a little...” 

Julian nods. Dukat is an oily upright dirtbag whose wife and mistresses probably talk to each other (coordinating plans for all the kids) more than they do to him and Damar, while mostly inoffensive, is hardly the stuff of legend unless you counted shots-per-night. 

“But Garak is the real thing, Julian. Be careful.”

Julian frowns at that. At the time he thinks that it’s oddly specist of her ( SEE: the ex with transparent skull. ALSO: Worf, he of the epic snaggle-tooth and typical Klingon mating habits). 

In hindsight there were two ways to read that statement.

For some reason for the rest of the night ‘Hello’, ‘Hi’ , ‘How are you doing?’ all seem to come out of his mouth as “So… Garak. What do you know about Garak?”

Quark, at least (found as per usual in the corner gamely trying to charge the newbies for soda), is immediately forthcoming.

“Oh Garak well, you know. Can’t say much about a fellow businessman.” he strokes a yellow nail down the side of a multi-paneled jacket that several ancient couches valiantly gave up their upholstery to make. “But I’ve heard he used to be in another line of work.. back on Cardassia” he motions Julian closer “I heard he’s got ties to the mob.”

Julian rolls his eyes. Quark undisputedly has ties to the mob. Consequently no one in his circle of friends is impressed with the word ‘mob’ anymore. Like any good entertainer Quark senses that he’s losing his audience and quickly backpedals.

“But that’s not why he had to leave Cardassia! _That_ was a _personal_ indiscretion - he had an affair with some lady aristocrat. Then the husband found out and well...” he spread his hands. 

_Now that’s ridiculous._ Thankfully a couple years of acquaintanceship and bar tabs has given Julian a sort of radar for Quark’s bullshit. The concepts of ‘Garak’ and ‘affair’ may slot together treacherously easily in his mind (both being mysterious, sexy things where he has 0 prior experience) but even after only meeting him once Julian can’t believe that if he wanted to seduce some 1%-er he’d get _caught_.

“I heard he was part of the Orion syndicate!” chimes in one of the hot Bajoran hipster girls who works at the bar.

“I-I heard it was that other one, that started with an ‘O’...” comes a shy voice somewhere behind Julian’s elbow.

“ _Shut up_ , Rom.” Quark whispers, cuffing his brother alongside the head not quite unkindly and thrusting a cartoonishly large mug of snail juice into his hands.

 _What else starts with an O?_ Julian thinks, before he’s distracted by Morn motioning him over.  
This gets him an inventory of everything his paramour-of-the-week has ever made him buy at Garak’s, but nothing useful. 

A parade of red cups mysteriously appears and disappears in his hands, the faces start to blur. 

Once he swears that he catches a flash of greenish-gray in a corner but he’s pretty sure it’s wistful thinking on his part. He’s just drunk enough to feel lonely, to wish there was an easy way out of it - that it was just a matter of finding the right person in the crowd. He doesn’t want to think about his next paper or the way his shifts next week overlap in a way that will have sprinting between busses. The memory of him holding a broad gray hand, the way Garak’s fingers had slowly flexed against his palm seems more important than all of that.

\- - -

With some trepidation Julian fiddles with the power cord of his laptop, plugs in the USB datastick and starts the book. 

The Soup Escalation gambit deserves a strong rejoinder. After two days it’s a safe bet that Garak isn’t going to just text him (or god forbid call, older people still called didn’t they?) and Julian gently stalking him at work again feels a bit… gauche? 

Initially clicking on the file loads a dense wall of angular script in his ancient word processor and he has a moment of panic but then the little cursor thing pops up with a speech bubble saying “I see you seem to be reading something in Kardasi…” and _oh thank god_ there's a ‘load Standard translation file' link at the bottom.

At first the prose is a little dry. It's like no one introduced Cardassian authors to the concept of 'the hook.' They seemed to assume that if you opened the book you already desperately wanted to hear everything they had to say. 

At least the protagonist is interesting. In the first twenty pages Julian learns his name, rank and family tree (and nothing else) but every word he says hints at intensely interesting personal details that he suspects he will have to wade through dry descriptions of military tribunals to learn.

Despite this first impression the next day he stays up until 2 am reading it. Worf had seen him talking to Jadzia at the party and was extra cranky, nearly hip-checking Julian every time they had to pass by each other the kitchen to show his manly dominance or whatever and after a shift of that a fictional account of the Klingon empire getting their asses handed to them was just the ticket. 

Enjoyable (vindictive) reading or not he’s certainly never studied this hard for a date. But now they have one sure-fire thing to talk about and now Julian can be impressively articulate. All that’s needed is the other half of the conversation. His eyes flick up to the latest chapter - another dry strategy bit: luring the enemy out by shadowing their trade routes...

He has a brilliant idea. With half-shut eyes Julian brings up the site for his bank balance. It’s... it’s... OK, it’s a little better than he'd thought. Full speed ahead. He opens the browser to a new tab, fills out a familiar gold-and-green form and settles down to wait. 

Two hours later his struggles with next week’s paper are interrupted by the clarion ring of the doorbell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear actual evil exes bits will start next chapter. Scott Pilgrim had meandering social bits in between the kung-fu too, didn't it?


End file.
